A couple pet-peaves.
January 26, 2005 @ 03:52 AMI woke up this morning with some nasty sinus issue that’s currently in the process of kicking my ass. Ugh… pain… stuffiness… I woke up this morning around 2:30-3 already starting to feel not-so-good. So I wrapped up in a big blanket and plopped myself in front of the TV and played Halo 2 for an hour, then went back to bed. Which reminds me, my XBox Live subscription is nearly expired, I must renew!
Random Pet-Peave Alert! Know what I hate? People who want resumes in Word format. In fact, this goes for a large number of electronic document transfers… letters, memos, etc, but I will focus on resumes. Word documents aren’t designed to be read-only presentations of something, they’re designed to be editable documents. Word itself is not a document VIEWER (although my whole point is it’s being USED that way, improperly), it’s a document EDITOR. The very concept of me building a resume in a document editor, and then sending my editable document to some random person to be reopened in another document editor is just completely irrational! Hopefully, nobody else is going to be editing your resume or cover letter. Nobody else needs access to the original document.
What’s the alternative, you ask? When you send your resume to a company, you’re really wanting to send a polished final “presentation” of that document. For this, it makes much more sense to send PDF documents. Think about it, when you send a paper resume, do you send a piece of paper with all your information taped into place? No. You edit the document so that it looks just the way you want it, and then you PRINT the document on to a final, non-editable presentation media (some nice paper, for example). Think of PDF as “printing” the document for electronic presentation. The reader can view the document without firing up a heavyweight editor; the templates, tables and fonts you used are not immediately discoverable. It’s just your resume, plain and simple. And it looks exactly the same on their Windows machine as it did on your Mac OS X machine.
I’m not saying you need to start sending all your resumes to companies in PDF format. If you want to job, you’d better send the resume in whatever format they’re requesting. I’m merely stating that it’s really stupid for most companies to keep requesting “text or Word Doc” files. Start asking for PDFs!
One last thing. I would like to address the anger I’ve been reading over a suggestion by Republican Bill Thomas (no stranger to controversy, admittedly) that Social Security benefits should be tied to race and gender. I mentioned that’s what the anger is directed at, but it must be pointed out that that was not what Bill Thomas directly said. What he said was that race and gender should be discussed in Congress as potenial factors to consider for Social Security benefits. He also followed up by stating that if Congress decided not to make any changes relating to race and gender, that would be fine, but it’s the responsibility of the Congress to discuss all factors.
Now, far-left Democrats will continue to scream that how dare the Republicans even MENTION such a thing… right? But they’re conveniently ignoring that Rep. Thomas is merely talking about statistical factors, most of which would likely favor minorities. For example, white females statistically live a lot longer than black males (something I heard on NPR. Please let me know if this is incorrect). Which means that white females statistically take a lot more out of the system than black males. How would that fact influence Social Security benefits? I don’t know, honestly, but I can’t imagine any way in which the white female would end up better off.
These types of statistics-based adjustments are used ALL THE TIME, and you don’t see the left complaining about it. Your auto insurance bill, for example, is adjusted based on your gender—specifically what your gender statistically will pull out of the insurance company’s pockets in relation to the opposite gender. And try getting a college scholarship as a white male. THAT’S not even based on statistical analysis, that’s just pure racial and gender descrimination. Where’s the outrage?
But the Dems - hurt and upset over their recent political losses - seem to think that getting even MORE militant, and more obstructive, and raising alarms over harmless discussions brought up by Republicans will somehow help their cause. So instead of actually having these rational discussions, they’ll continue screaming. And they’ll continue blaming. And they’ll continue losing.